In order to impress Tsarina Catherine
with his self-promoting efforts at developing the barren Russian
steppes in the 18th century, Prince Potemkin supposedly constructed
elaborate facades of artificial villages for her to see when her
carriage passed through the region. A Potemkin village
is what came to mind when we saw the first issue of the Internationalist
(January-February 1997), a 64-page, two-color journal recently
published by a handful of defectors from our organization who
call themselves the Internationalist Group (IG).

 Potemkin Village Idiocy,
WV No. 663, 7 March 1997

Thats what we wrote nearly seven
years ago. In that time the little Potemkins of the IG have been
busy constructing the facade that is their international. In cyberspace
they present long, turgid articles in multiple languages intended
to give the grand impression that they swim deep in the boiling
water of the worldwide class struggle. On the ground, the
reality is quite different.

A case in point: the Revolutsionnaya
Kommunisticheskaya Organisatsiya (RKORevolutionary
Communist Organization) of Ukraine. In July 2001, with much fanfare,
the IG published a Declaration of Fusion between their
League for the Fourth International (LFI) and the
RKO. They solemnly vowed to uphold Bolshevik-Leninism
and to further the struggle to reforge an authentically
Trotskyist Fourth International as the world party of socialist
revolution. Fine words, but there was one problem: the RKO
never existed.

Last summer, after a two-year marriage,
the IG declared annulment when it was revealed that (surprise!)
their mail-order Ukrainian bride of a section was
a bunch of con artists scamming Western leftists for money. The
hustlers, who had long been the Ukrainian section of Peter Taaffes
Committee for a Workers International (CWI),
were able to sell themselves off as the sections of
as many as ten different self-professed revolutionary organizations,
including the grotesquely misnamed International Bolshevik Tendency
(BT) and the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP).

As we explained in Workers Vanguard
when the scandal broke (see Chickens Come Home to Roost
in Kiev, WV No. 808, 29 August 2003):

We are not privy to the sleazy
details, and we have no confidence in anybodys account of
what happened. But by their own words these so-called victims
stand condemned as utter frauds and co-conspirators with their
Kiev con men! Now they scream, We wuz robbed! But
they were more than happy to perpetrate their con on the left
public by trumpeting their fraudulent Ukrainian sections.

That the IG ended up in the embrace of
a gang of brazen con artists should not come as a surprise to
those who have followed its political trajectory. From its inception
the IG has accommodated itself promiscuously to alien forces,
seeking regroupments with politically distant elements
as a substitute for the necessary struggle to forge a programmatically
cohesive, Leninist international organization. In 1995-96, while
still a member of our organization, Jan Norden (now the IGs
supremo) sought a phony regroupment with elements of the Communist
Platform of the German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), claiming
that the PDS maintained attachments to what was by
then the long-since defunct East German deformed workers state.
Indeed, the Communist Platform/PDS had been junior partners with
Gorbachev in the selloutof East Germany to the
West German imperialists. Upon their defection from the ICL, Norden
et al. linked up with the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista (LQB)
in Brazil, an organization with which we had just broken fraternal
relations when it became clear that they were simply trade-union
opportunists. Subsequently the LQB went on to cross the class
line repeatedly by suing a trade union in the bourgeois courts.

We recognize that revolutionary regroupmentprincipled
splits and fusions with other tendencies in the workers movementis
an important tactic for constructing a Leninist vanguard, including
on international terrain. The Spartacist League/U.S. emerged out
of the Revolutionary Tendency, an opposition in the American Socialist
Workers Party. Over the course of years we recruited from groupings
that originated in ostensibly Trotskyist, Maoist, New Leftist,
feminist and other tendencies. The essential basis for such regroupments
has been a common programmatic frameworktested in
practice through exemplary actions and involvement in social struggle;
vigorous internal debate and rigorous cadre education.

But the purpose of Nordens LFI
is not this but to impress the unwary with cyberspace boasting
of international connections. Lofty statements are
written for public consumption and to create an umbrella of orthodoxy
to shield the very alien practices carried out on the ground.
To believe the IG, Norden himself had little clue what his Ukrainian
section had been doing for two years! The BT now claims
to have recruited the IGs Dutch affiliatewhich by
the BTs account consisted of one individual (1917
No. 26, 2004)!

Mutual Amnesty

At the time of our previous article on
what happened in Kiev, the IG had yet to comment on the con game.
A response appeared in the October-November 2003 Internationalist.
Notwithstanding the differences the IG claims with the state-capitalist
LRP or the dubious Stalinophobic BT headed by the sociopath Bill
Logan, Nordens response was virtually identical. They all
attempted to salve their wounded egos, pontificating that, after
all, the Bolsheviks were infiltrated by Roman Malinovsky, a secret
agent for the tsar, and the Trotskyist Left Opposition by Mark
Zborowski (Étienne), a Stalinist agent. There is no relationship
in these comparisons to what actually happened in Ukraine. Far
from being a deep dark secret of the invisible espionage netherworld,
the real nature of the Kiev scam artists was known to the Ukrainian
left, and the IG were among the laughing stocks:

Kiev left-radical circles ever
since the mid-90s have been following with interest the scams
of a group led by the well-known cde. V.... Since all of these
political sects wanted a Ukrainian section for prestige, this
group set up ties and easily passed itself off as co-thinkers....
Oh, its so easy to fool me, I myself wanted to be
deceived [Pushkin].... This looks a little like provocation,
but in Kiev no one would fall for itit was all too obvious.

Wouldnt any politically observant
person have noticed that in the space of a few months, several
political tendencies were acquiring Ukrainian sections
in Kiev, including quirky groups like the De Leonists in the American
Socialist Labor Party? The IG and others didnt ask questions
because they didnt want to know the answer. Like Pushkins
love-struck fool, they refused to see what was there because they
did not want to see.

When the Kiev hoax was exposed, the IG
acted like pious politicians, who, when caught with their pants
down in a den of iniquity, claim they were carrying out their
own independent probe. They have the nerve to cite Victor
Serges excellent 1921 handbook, What Every Revolutionary
Should Know About State Repression:

In his conclusions, Serge wrote:
Provocation is much more dangerous in terms of the distrust
it sows among revolutionaries. As soon as a few traitors are unmasked,
trust disappears from within the organizations. It is a terrible
thing, because confidence in the party is the cement of all revolutionary
forces.

 A Band of Political Impostors
and Swindlers in Ukraine, 27 August 2003

In a revolutionary organization trust
is based on verification in common political work. Bolshevism
was born of a split over Lenins insistence in 1903 that
no one be extended the trust and responsibility of party membership
without direct systematic work in a party committee. By being
compelled to carry out systematic revolutionary work under the
eye of the party, Serge wrote, The agent provocateur is
a policeman who serves the revolution in spite of himself. Because
he must always appear to be serving it. But in this question
there are no appearances.... There is no way you can be a member
halfway or superficially. For the Kiev con artists, their
only obligation as members was to cash the checks
as they came in.

Along with Zborowski, Malinovsky and
other provocateurs, in its article on Ukraine the IG mentions
the name of Raymond Molinier, a member of the French Trotskyists
in the 1930s. The IG says that Molinier came up with one
opportunist gimmick after another, and made his living through
bill collecting, and then mentions that he was expelled
from the Fourth International. But contrary to the impression
left by the IG, that was not the reason for Moliniers expulsion.
No charges were ever presented against him on these grounds. Perhaps
the reason Norden does not give the straight story on Molinier
is because he bears some political resemblance to the latter.
Molinier was a political adventurer who was all too willing to
cut corners programmatically for short-term organizational advantage.
Despairing of the hard political struggle which had to be waged
against popular-frontism in France, he set up his own newspaper
in 1935 and was expelled for this by the Trotskyists. When the
Molinier group launched its fake mass paper which
promised to speak the language of the factories and the
fields, to tell of the misery which reigns there,
to express its passions and rouse to revolt, Trotsky
had the following scathing comment:

This is a very laudable intention,
although the masses know perfectly well their own misery and their
feelings of revolt (stifled by the patriotic apparatuses with
the aid of the [centrist] Pivertists). What the masses can demand
of a newspaper is a clear program and a correct orientation.

 Leon Trotsky, What Is a
Mass Paper? (1935)

IG Spits on Revolutionary Continuity
of ICL

Stalin noted that paper would take anything
printed on it, but the IG was so anxious to rush through a fusion
that they didnt even bother to check their putative marriage
partners paper positions. The Fall 2001 Internationalist
ran a graphic captioned, RKO posters raised LFIs call
for Arab/Hebrew workers revolution. The accompanying fusion
declaration boasted: Late last year, as courageous Arab
youth armed with nothing but stones were being slaughtered in
the West Bank and Gaza, the LFI and RKO coordinated our participation
in protest actions denouncing the Zionist murderers, including
putting out posters calling to Defend the Palestinian People
and For Arab-Hebrew Workers Revolution! For a Socialist
Federation of the Near East! But the placards appearing
in the graphic contain neither the slogan For Arab-Hebrew
Workers Revolution! nor For a Socialist Federation
of the Near East! Now, after the scandal has been
publicized, Norden acknowledges that his bloc partners did
send us leaflets they claimed to have issued in antiwar protests,
but they did not have the position of the LFI on Israel-Palestine,
which had been a subject of considerable discussion. A little
late!

But at least they had a formally correct
line on Chechnya, right? After all, military defense of Chechnya
against the Russian-led bloody colonial war is the cutting edge
issue for Marxists in the region. Russias war against the
largely Islamic population in Chechnya has been central to ideologically
reinforcing Great Russian chauvinism, which is a key prop for
the new capitalist regime. This ideology asserts itself as well
in much of eastern Ukraine, where centuries of tsarist Russian
domination had far deeper roots than in western Ukraine, and where
today a substantial Russian population resides. But the IGs
fusion statement not only failed to take a stand on the side of
the Chechens just war against Putins genocidal onslaught,
it said not one word on the war at all!

At the time of their Ukrainian fusion,
the IG boasted that it was the first realization of
their perspective of international revolutionary regroupment.
Indeed! While the IG occasionally likes to claim that it stands
on the work of the ICL when their leaders were members, their
fusion statement with the RKO was premised on the rejection and
disappearance of the ICLs proud history in the former Soviet
Union, including Ukraine. The fusion statement proclaimed that
the RKO was composed of people who publicly announced their
intention to establish the Fourth International section
in 1989. But the IG could not, and did not, say what the members
of the RKO were doing at this time, a period in which
the ICL was actively fighting against counterrevolution and for
the program of revolutionary Trotskyism. In the summer of 1989,
spontaneous strikes which erupted in the Soviet coal fields against
the ravages of Gorbachevs market socialism dramatically
demonstrated the potential for militant working-class struggle.
A year later, two comrades of the ICL intervened at a conference
of Soviet miners held in Donetsk, Ukraine. Politically it was
the ICL on the one side and, on the other, British embassy representatives,
the AFL-CIOs Freedom House, the Russian fascist NTS and
the scab British Union of Democratic Miners (UDM),
an anti-Communist outfit formed and financed in an attempt to
break the British coal strike of 1984-85 led by Arthur Scargills
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The ICL spiked an attempt
by the UDM and their imperialist advisers to get the Soviet miners
to denounce Scargill.

When the hour of mortal danger to the
USSR arrived in August 1991, the ICL was unique on the left in
seeking to mobilize the Soviet workers against the counterrevolutionary
coup of Yeltsin and George Bush Sr. As capitalism consolidated
itself, we sought to drive home to the working people of the ex-USSR
the lessons of this catastrophe. In June 1993 the ICL intervened
in a massive strike of coal miners and other workers in Ukraine,
selling over 2,400 pieces of Spartacist literature at one rally
alone at the peak of a strike that represented the first proletarian
challenge to the capitalist states erected in the wake of the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR.

The IG concluded its fusion statement
with the empty boast that in Ukraine it would continue the
work of the tens of thousands of Bolshevik-Leninists who fell
under Stalinist, fascist and bourgeois-democratic
repression. Shamefully, the statement made no mention of
the murder in February 1992 of Martha Phillips, the ICLs
leading spokesman in Moscow. The authorities stonewalled while
we tried in vain to find out who killed our comrade. Nor does
the IG say anything about the ICLs expulsion from Ukraine
in 1995. The ICL was lyingly accused by the Ukrainian government
of seeking the overthrow of the government and our
members were banned from the country. The banning of the ICL was
splashed across television screens and the press throughout Ukraine
and Russia. This was done not only to muzzle us but to further
intimidate the left and workers movement. We organized international
protests, urging leftists and workers organizations to take a
stand in defense of our rights and theirs.

Presumably the leaders of the IG, who
were members of our organization throughout this period, ought
to have at least been interested in what their bloc partners had
done in response to this state repression of the ICL, and in fact
this would be one way of testing the authenticity of any group
that claimed to have been Trotskyist since 1989. But the IG fusion
statement was smugly silent on this, as it was on the other work
of the ICL in Ukraine. As irony would have it, the Ukraine hustlers
of today were then, as the Ukrainian section of the CWI, the ICLs
main leftist opponent in Kiev, where we were engaged in regular
political debate at Kiev University. They not only did not protest
our expulsion, but they were somehow able to continue their operation
at Kiev University, where longtime CWI honcho Oleg Vernik is evidently
now an assistant lecturer, without a hitch for almost another
decade!

In the fusion statement the only comment
made by the RKO comrades about the ICL and its work
is that we allegedly refused to debate programmatic questions.
No one who has ever met with a member of the ICL would believe
this statement! What this really shows is that the IG blindly
embraced these dubious elements precisely because they denounced
the ICL!

League for a Fraudulent International

The IGs methods are hardly new,
as attested by their very origins in breaking from the ICL. A
case in point was their embrace of Luta Metalúrgica (LM),
now the LQB, as they were departing the ICL. LM had originated
as a proletarian formation with a militant history in the steel
industry center of Volta Redonda (near Rio de Janeiro). But future
IG leader Norden and his sidekick Negrete sought to undermine
our struggle with LM for programmatic clarity from start to finish,
from the September 1994 Declaration of Fraternal Relations to
their constant attempts to obstruct political fights, to their
ultimate bloc with LMs amorphous centrism against the ICL.

The 1994 declarationwholly drafted
by Norden and Negrete, who went on to become líder mínimo
of the IGwas deliberately cast to portray a broad, deep
and synthetic programmatic agreement that simply did not exist.
At the same time it virtually ignored issues such as permanent
revolution, the Trotskyist program as it applies to countries
of combined and uneven development. This meant that the declaration
did not probe areas in which one might likely discover differences,
such as possible adaptations to Latin American nationalism or,
for that matter, insufficient vigor in opposing the depredations
of imperialism. Had we accepted the methodology of Norden and
Negrete, we would have accommodated to a bogus internationalism
in which claimed political agreement is simply a cover for the
various national sections to carry out whatever opportunist line
they see fit, varying according to the differing terrains on which
they do work. As Trotsky noted:

By its very nature opportunism
is nationalistic, since it rests on the local and temporary needs
of the proletariat and not on its historical tasks. Opportunists
find international control intolerable and they reduce their international
ties as much as possible to harmless formalities....

 The Defense of the Soviet
Republic and the Opposition (September 1929)

The idea that fraternal relations are
a testing process for solid programmatic agreement, requiring
ongoing political struggle, was completely alien to Norden. For
more than a year after we initiated fraternal relations with LM,
there was no progress toward a programmatically based fusion.
We then invited a leading representative of LM to an authoritative
January 1996 meeting of our International Executive Committee.
LM agreed on the need to transform itself from a trade-union fraction
without a party into a Trotskyist propaganda group in Brazil,
through an agenda of common workpublishing a party propaganda
organ, extending LMs presence to a major metropolitan center
and seeking to win new recruits from the younger generation. At
this meeting we learned that a municipal workers union whose leadership
was braintrusted by LM included a substantial proportion of cops.
Indeed LMs slate in the union had received the vote of the
majority of these same cops. We fought with LM to wage a campaign
to get the cops out of the union and invested significant resources
to maintain an ICL representative in Brazil.

After months of intensive discussion,
it became clear that what LM/LQB wanted was a Potemkin village
International which would finance and otherwise support
their unprincipled trade-union maneuvers, including an LM leaders
position as an unelected adviser to this cop-ridden
union. (See A Break in Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica,
WV No. 648, 5 July 1996.) But for the IG the idea that
we would break with a Latin American group with a base
in the trade unions on the basis of principle was unthinkable.

Pabloites of the Second Mobilization

In their article on the Kiev fiasco,
the IG asserts: The appearance of shady characters is particularly
frequent after a defeat of the proletariat, when the workers movement
is in a phase of decomposition. This is the situation today in
the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is indeed likely
that there is a link between what happened in Kiev and the fact
of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR. But since its inception,
the IG itself has made it a cardinal point of principle to deny
the enormous negative impact that the restoration of capitalism
in the former Soviet Union and East Europe has had on the consciousness
of the working class of the world.

Our aim is the fight for new October
Revolutions. But the disproportion between this purpose and the
current political consciousness of the working class, youth and
the left internationally is great. Today the mass of workers and
even most leftists do not connect their struggles with the goal
of proletarian revolution. For Norden, the gap between what we
strive for and the current consciousness of the working class
became a yawning abyss, leading him to defect from our organization.

In a letter to Norden a couple of months
before his exit from our ranks, comrade Joseph Seymour pointed
out:

I believe you do not accept that,
beginning in the late 1970s, there has occurred a historic
retrogression in the political consciousness of the working
class and left internationally. This development both conditioned
the counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc and has been reinforced
by it. Thats why we now encounter anarchists rather than
ostensible Trotskyists or Maoists among the mainstream of young
radicals in France....

The main point is that organizational
affiliation follows from and is based on political understanding
and agreement, which cannot be achieved at an arbitrary or forced-march
pace. Stop trying to get rich quick. It aint that kind of
period.

Norden evidenced a deepening pessimism
about the ability of our organization and its revolutionary program
to have any impact in the post-Soviet order, expressed in ever
more frequent broadsides against the ICLs supposed abstract
or passive propagandism. In reality Norden saw elements
of communist consciousness where none existed, leading to an increasingly
desperate chase after alien social forces.

We have described this as Pabloism
of the second mobilization, referring to the liquidationist
current that destroyed the Fourth International in the early 1950s.
Faced with the onset of the Cold War and the creation of Stalinist-ruled
deformed workers states in East Europe, the Pabloites denied the
need to construct Trotskyist parties and instead sought to pressure
the Stalinists to outline a roughly revolutionary
course. Nordens latter-day Pabloism reflects despair over
the destruction of the USSR and imperialist gloating over the
death of communism.

Building an international in the wake
of the worldwide destruction unleashed by the collapse of the
workers states in East Europe and the former Soviet Union is extremely
difficult. There are no shortcuts. But there is no alternative,
either. This struggle must be based on firm adherence to the Trotskyist
program. The IG was conceived out of the rejection of the fight
for Trotskyism. Their only grounds for complaint in Ukraine is
that they thought they had purchased the exclusive rights to the
services of some political hucksters, only to find out that the
latter were simultaneously working for the competition.